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  • Is gold jewelry money?

Oakley, Peter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7876-8402, 2020, Book Section, Is gold jewelry money? In: Schmidt, Mario and Ross, Sandy, (eds.) Money counts: Revisiting economic calculation. Studies in Social Analysis, 10 . Berghahn, New York, USA, pp. 17-30. ISBN 978-1789206852

Abstract or Description:

Abstract: This chapter explores the extent to which gold jewelry, an object type conventionally looked on as a means of display, should also be seen as a type of money. Drawing on historical evidence and ethnographic research, the analysis considers the ways in which two examples—the Renaissance money chain and the modern jewelry collection—exhibit characteristics fundamental to money: liquidity, partibility, and recursive divisibility. As a result, this study proposes that gold jewelry can best be described as a type of para-money. The article concludes that due to its ambiguous state, gold jewelry is able to act as a mediator in social situations where exchanges of money proper are considered unacceptable, and that this is an important yet under- acknowledged aspect of its social identity.

Official URL: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SchmidtMoney
Subjects: Other > Social studies > L600 Anthropology > L610 Social and Cultural Anthropology
Creative Arts and Design > W700 Crafts > W790 Crafts not elsewhere classified
School or Centre: School of Arts & Humanities
Funders: AHRC
Uncontrolled Keywords: gold; money; jewellery; jewelry; material culture
Date Deposited: 18 Aug 2020 10:14
Last Modified: 01 Jan 2022 08:38
URI: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/4474
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